Last week, I got a call from my roommate who is currently living at my house in Louisville.  He had come home to find the house broken into and quite a few things missing, among them my TV, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii. Fortunately, my custom built desktop computer was left behind, probably due to it being so heavy.

Unfortunately, I’m basically hosed with respect to what they did take. I had never bothered to get renter’s insurance to cover my electronics, nor did I have the serial numbers to my consoles backed up anywhere to give to the police. Obviously, this will all change for me, but you can avoid having to learn this the hard way, and for relatively cheap.

If you rent a house or apartment, look into renter’s insurance. It’s relatively cheap (probably around $10/month) and will cover your belongings if they are stolen.

Secondly, keep a record of your electronics’ serial numbers. I’ve started using Evernote for this, as any information in Evernote is synced to their servers.  Without a serial number, your chances of recovering stolen property can drop dramatically.

Finally, back up your data off-site. I was lucky enough to not have my desktop computer taken, but if it had been, that would have been several hundred gigabytes of media gone. There are a couple of easy ways to protect yourself against that. The easiest is to use a service like Carbonite, which gives you unlimited off-site backup of your data for around $50 a year. If you’d rather not pay someone to host your data for you, you can buy a couple of external hard drives and back your data up to them, but you need to be sure to store that backup in a different location that your computers, whether that’s leaving it at a friend’s place, or storing it at your office at work.

As it stands now, I’m stuck paying around $1200 if I want to replace what I lost, but if I had bothered to insure my possessions, I could be paying a $250 deductible instead.